Tag Archives: rick perry

In Rick Perry’s oddly dull offering, the color scheme of its central icon is particularly objectionable, the blue bleeding into red, the red into blue, creating a purplish, muddled mess. But here as elsewhere we are dealing with a situation where the images are hamstrung, they have no choice, it seems, but to dabble only in variations in reds and blues. To do otherwise might court disaster in color-blind America. So Perry’s image feels it must embrace those separate shades but has no idea what to do with them. We recognize in Perry’s iconography the pharmaceutical sheen of a throat lozenge, as if Perry held out the hope for us of serving as a blue Pfizer pill against the impotence of secular, post-industrial America.

I myself have been watching these identities pop up with great interest, as the quality of graphic design in a campaign does seem to have some power of prediction in elections. And Rick Perry’s motifs are pretty terrible.

Rick Perry’s about to announce his candidacy for President, and with the John Kerry of the GOP currently leading the pack, Perry looks pretty well-positioned to become the front-runner for the Republican nomination. He’s got both the social conservative cred and the record as a successful governor of a state that’s done relatively okay during the Great Recession. Somehow though, it seems like we’re forgetting a crucial part of the Rick Perry Story. Take it away, Alex Pareene:

Perry’s flirtations with neo-Confederate organizations and symbols — ably documented by Justin Elliott — are so extraordinarily reprehensible that it should immediately and permanently disqualify him from being taken seriously for national office. The Confederacy was not a bunch of generally well-meaning dudes who went a little too far, it was a gang of racist traitors who launched a bloody war to defend a monstrously unjust institution.

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This, of course, is not even mentioning the time Rick Perry fucking killed an innocent person. Which, talk about disqualifying! This is the new front-runner, the man who doesnt care that he killed an innocent person. Whee!